Baz Camp

Started: 2005-09-10 23:05:00

Submitted: 2005-09-10 23:41:16

Visibility: World-readable

In the beginning was Foo Camp -- the Friends of O'Reilly -- who got together to hack merrily. The following year, some open-source luminaries who didn't get invited weren't happy, so they created their own gathering -- Bar Camp. Off to one side, far away in Colorado, was Hackathon, which decided to rename itself Baz Camp (that link may or may not work; there's not much content there at the moment).

I'm sitting behind a sheet hung up to be a projector screen that's currently displaying some bizarre PS2 game; apparently it involves rolling around a playing field picking up trash on the ground to add to one's ball. The bigger one's ball is the stuff one can pick up. I have a pretty good view of the screen, except that it's backwards. That made it difficult to read the subtitles on Shaolin Soccer earlier, but that was ok because I already knew the plot.

I asked on the irc channel and learned that the game is Katamari Damarcy. It actually looks somewhat amusing.

So far on Hackathon, I've amused myself by adding content to the Megafest Wiki (which seems appropriate, since Hackathon is like a Megafest outdoors), set up a vpn (which I'm currently using to connect to my database to write this changelog), and became horribly addicted to Planarity, a simple Flash game in which one attempts to rearrange a graph's vertices so that none of its edges intersect. After spending several hours playing I'm only slightly closer to coming up with an algorithm to do this automatically. Of course, the problem is far more interesting with non-planar graphs, where there is no "right" answer, only graph arrangements that are better and worse. It's computer science theory that I can touch, which is neat.